Dave is moving to the West Midlands to be nearer his grown children. Dave is the man who’s been responsible for bundling up copies of our parish magazine. He makes sure that each of the volunteers doing the actual door-to-door delivery has the right number. We’ll need to find someone else to do this, someone as reliable, and, ideally, as cheerful, as Dave. When Dave stepped down, the friend who helped him quit too. This is, unfortunately, quite normal with volunteers. For Dave’s friend, the camaraderie of working with Dave was the thing that made bundling magazines worthwhile. He’s not interested in continuing with whoever comes next.
This worries the editor, and so it worries me. The editor would quite like to step down too. There are other things he wants to do in retirement besides editing the parish magazine. He’s a good editor though, and, having had difficulty replacing the last one, I’d like to persuade him to stick around. This means finding a couple of other people to be sub-editors.
That’s just the parish magazine. There are other posts that need filling. For starters, only one of my three parishes has a church warden. Church wardens are vital. They’re legally officers of the bishop, and, essentially, lay ministers, “the foremost among the laity”. The list of their responsibilities has grown over the years to the point where the prospect of becoming a church warden makes stalwart Christians quail. My one church warden is, naturally, in the smallest parish, the one with a tiny congregation, not much money, and two churches in its bounds. He says that being a church warden is surprisingly satisfying. The satisfaction comes from the people involved: the people to whom he brings communion in their homes, the ones attending services, even the parochial church council (PCC). The form-filling, however, increases every year, he says, and is soul-destroying. In theory we should have two church wardens per parish. In practice there is just this one good old man whom I scrutinise every time I see him for signs of discouragement or decay.
In my biggest parish, Fulbourn, we need a treasurer quite urgently, because our current treasurer has been trying to retire from the job for the past two years. We need a secretary for the PCC as well. Actually, we need two of those. One of the other parishes is also limping along without either a church warden or a PCC secretary.
The various surveys about “fragile churches” in rural areas, churches like mine where it’s hard to find volunteers for the important posts in the church, don’t give the details of why people aren’t easily persuaded to take on these roles. The pandemic has something to do with it, but there are wider socio-demographic factors in play. There used to be a cohort of energetic, newly -retired middle-class English people who understood that when one retired, one became a church warden. It was a form of noblesse oblige, the sunny side of entitlement. That generation has almost passed away. People are tired. A lot of them have caring responsibilities. If they’re in good health and aren’t looking after someone, they go on cruises, unburdened by the impulse to polish brass or attend Deanery Synod. The working-age adults in the congregations scarcely have a spare minute between jobs, children and parents, and the thought of taking on a major responsibility at church and probably being stuck with it for years appals them. Maybe they’ll join a working party in the churchyard or go on the rota for intercessions. Maybe, if we’re extremely lucky, they’ll discover a gift for teaching Sunday School. This is the way things are in country parishes in the Church of England.
Twenty-five years ago, we were told that the parish priest of the future wouldn’t be reading, praying, or visiting. We would be managing volunteers, and they’d do everything. Don’t think of yourself as a middle manager, we were told, but as a tiny bishop. Five years ago, we learned of the Myriad Project, which would fund 10,000 lay-led church plants within the Church, each of which would evangelise many more thousands, who would clean the gutters, maintain the churchyard and oversee the distribution of the parish magazine.
So now I’m imagining a triptych. On one panel is a vision of 10,000 church plants managed, perhaps, by the Head of Mission and Ministry via a laptop in a diocesan office. On the other side is St Peter’s Cradley 40 years ago. When the late David Rogers was Vicar there, he was a one-man band. As well as the duties pertaining to his calling, David played the organ, saw to the boiler, cleaned the church and arranged the flowers. It was an act of cheerful humility for that saintly man. I remember him singing descant in the Redditch Crem when I took a funeral right after one of his. And in the big central panel I’d put my own benefice and others like it, where a priest and some people struggle to get things done against all odds and sometimes manage it.
